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Rushmore Anniversary Coins 800-972-0300 ADVER.TISEMENT the outrage and the sense of purpose having seeped out in the drive to make money and escape from Chinatown. Today, a student trying to register voters complains, "It's a hard job. People don't know the candidates, and in Asia the tradition is that people don't get involved in politics." The wonton man is out. A thin man with coarse black hair, he works on the sidewalk on an upended cardboard box, on which a ceramic plate is piled with ground meat. For utensils, he has two scrap- ers. In his left hand is a floured square of dough, the wonton. He scrapes twice off the pile of meat, puts the dab inside the square held in his cupped hand, and makes a fist, squeezing the dough until it resembles a belly button. Customers watch. He puts the wonton on a cookie sheet on his counter-another card- board box. When he has twenty wontons, he takes a customer's twenty- dollar bill He asks for smaller change, but the customer has none. Looking around furtively, he slips the twenty down his sock and under his foot, and slips his foot back in his shoe. From somewhere else he extracts a wad of neatly folded singles, and he hands over eighteen. " w " h b k " V d " onton, e ar s. ery goo . Up the street, in a Thai grocery, the owner, a woman wearing wide green silk pants, stands on a plastic milk crate, bowing and praying to a Buddha on top of her freezer. Two open glass jars of coconut milk are up there, too, wIth bowls of offerings, two lighted candles, and a burning stick of incense. The Buddha looks like Jesus of Nazareth, with a yellow sash across a white shift. The woman gasps, startled to find me staring. The only Western product in the grocery is Pringle's potato chips. There is dried octopus, with shrivelled suckers, in plastic bags. There are black preserved eggs from China. Duck eggs lie in sawdust, flies buzzing above. Sections of palm leaves are shockingly green among the dried and packaged merchandise. The mothers watching children in the parks are the real power in Chi- natown: many earn more than their husbands, who can no longer look on them as just baby machines. Remark- ably, in this troubled community there is little drug use, AIDS, homelessness, or teen-age pregnancy. Here the major health problems are parasites; giardiasis, an intestinal ailment common in China, Cambodia, and Vietnam; hepatitis; malnutrition; anemia; and high cho- lesterol from oily foods. On Grand Street, the nougat vender is out with her pushcart. In Little Italy, the feeling is different: people yell and argue in the streets, and fights break out. In Chinatown, no one yells or argues. It's too dangerous. Guns and cellular telephones are stashed all over Chinatown Even gang members duck when a car backfires. No one talks to me, a low faan, as I wander. I poke along Mulberry, no- tice an alley between two stores which is piled with boxes, and follow it into an inner courtyard backed by a decrepit low tenement-a "rear tenement." Wedged between its taller neighbors, it was put up before the building code was changed at the turn of the century. In the courtyard, a man in an apron is bending over a metal tub, stirring bloody tripe with his hands. He doesn't live here, he says. He lives with twelve other bachelors in a gong si fong. The courtyard is piled with bags of cement, barrels of brick dust, discarded wooden shipping boxes stamped "DRIED Lo- TUS ROOTS." It is a gritty, gray, forlorn place, a patch of old Chinatown more or less untouched since the eigh- teen-eighties. The rear tenement, its windows broken or blackened with soot, its front door gone, looks uninhabited. Yet from a second-story window an ivy plant straggles. The stairway is nearly blocked with trash. Both ground-floor apart- ments are locked. I climb the stairs, expecting to find the second floor open to the sky and pigeons nesting. On the landing, a candle and two dusty balls of string, which on inspection turn out to be dried-up oranges, lie on the floor by a door. On the door, there is a red sign bright with gold calligraphy and happy dragons. The oranges and the sign grant blessings on everyone who enters this door. I knock. A frail old man appears. He greets me quizzically. He has lived in Chinatown for sixty years, he says, and has never spoken to a white per- son. -GwEN KINKEAD ( Thzs is the second part of a two-part article.)